1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a structured document edit apparatus, structured document edit method, and program product, which are used to edit a structured document on a display screen.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, Internet technologies and, especially, Web technologies have prevailed, and documents described in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) can be browsed everywhere independently of the types of operating system and Web browser.
In an HTML document, text and style information (information associated with the way of display on a screen such as font size, font type, text color, background color, table width, and the like) are mixed. Also, tags which bound text in the document have only information associated with a structure on a screen. For these reasons, the content of the HTML document is not easy to use as information used by a computer. Hence, as one of structured document techniques for structuring a document by bounding text by tags with some meanings, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has been standardized and prevalently used.
On the other hand, it is not easy for the user to read an XML document itself. Hence, as one of style techniques for shaping an XML document into an easy-to-read form by transforming it into an HTML document by appending style information and the like, and allowing the user to browse the transformed document in a Web browser, XSLT (XSL Transformation) has been developed and standardized.
XSLT is a program language for transforming an XML document described in XML, and a program that executes an XSLT document described in XSLT to convert an XML document is called an XSLT processor. Nowadays, Web browsers that incorporate the XSLT processor are increasingly prevalent.
As means for editing this XML document, a method of directly editing data using a text editor, and a method of manipulating data on a hierarchical structure using a dedicated editor are available. In addition, when data items are fixed like an XML document for a specific application, a method of generating an HTML form dedicated to that application, and updating a source XML document by a Web server on the basis of the contents input to that form is available.
On the other hand, in order to edit an XSLT document, a method of using a dedicated edit apparatus, and a method of directly editing an XSLT document using a text editor are available. Also, as a debug method of confirming if transformation in an XSLT document correctly works, a method of using a dedicated debugger, and a debug method of rewriting an XSLT document and confirming the result in a Web browser are used.
As structured documents obtained by transforming an XML document by an XSLT document, for example, an XHTML (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) document, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) document, MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) document, and the like are known in addition to an HTML document.
However, the aforementioned conventional techniques suffer the following problems as XML document edit means.
When an XML document is transformed into an HTML document by arbitrary XSLT, a source XML document cannot be edited on a screen image displayed in a Web browser. That is, with such XML document edit means, text that is hard for the people to read must be edited, or an XML document must be edited using an editor having a dedicated screen such as a hierarchical structure or the like. Also, a dedicated input screen must be prepared for each data structure of an XML document for a specific purpose.
A method of modifying an XSLT processor that transforms an XML document into an HTML document so as to store correspondence between the screen image and XML document nodes, and allowing to reflect the edit results on the screen image on a source XML document may be used. However, since this method requires a special Web browser having a particular XSLT processor, a feature of the Web technology that allows every Web browser to browse may be disturbed.
Likewise, since an XSLT document used to transform an XML document into an HTML document cannot be edited in a Web browser, style information and the like appended by XSLT cannot be changed in the Web browser.
Also, since a template in an XSLT document used to generate nodes of an HTML document in a Web browser cannot be examined, it is difficult to debug XSLT on the screen image displayed in the Web browser.
Furthermore, upon editing an XML document, it is often required to allow to edit an XML document only partially in correspondence with the authority or the like. Moreover, it is demanded for an edit method to allow designations by means of inputs using text boxes and selection inputs using selection boxes. However, an XML document and XSLT document cannot describe such edit functions.
The same applies to a case wherein transformed structured documents are those other than an HTML document.